Not sure about the bit where it says businesses should be strict about those that abuse it – what does abuse me? Seems to me a lack of understanding of the tools available. Perhaps they have to create something like our (IBM) social computing guidelines.

4 thoughts on “Bosses “should embrace Facebook””

The same happened to me. I explain it in short: In Hungary there is a facebook-like thing called IWIW. Honestly speaking it is a far cry from Facebook but whatever…So I suggested to my superior to use that channel because there is an option to do it. Somebody has already created an “identity” in the name of the company and I believed we can negotiate with him/her to reach those employees, who are working on the shop floor. At now he/she has 1608 contacts from the 4600 employees. I didn’t intend to use that channel so vehemently so I thought we could send some non-confidential but useful information once in a month.

Well, my suggestion died a year ago. Later on – some months ago – an internal communicator was recruited to the company European headquarter (in the Netherlands). I quite like her and what is important she has real experience in the field. Two weeks ago she visited us her in Hungary and told us her plans regarding social networking within the company – it will be some staff directory thing but only for the white-collars. Yeah, my superiors pretended that they like her plans but I believe they cannot understand what this all is about. Why I am saying that? Because at one part of the conversation they expressed their thoughts about the “how-to-control-this thing-and-who-can-have-access-to-it”.

Huh, it is not so short as I planned….And I have something to tell: I have just checked the IWIW and found that two production areas of the company have got their own accounts….

You obviously know that trying to control this sort of thing is pretty much impossible. Your management needs to understand that – hopefully they will now seeing people going out and just doing this stuff.

What would be useful to your business is a set of guidelines on social media so that everyone knows what is expected of them, what can be posted and that they make anyone reading aware they are NOT talking on behalf of the company.

Inside the enterprise I would say that IBM is not typical. People are given quite a lot of room and the guidelines are one thing that helps. Another from a technical point of view is having one central employee directory – this is the killer app. Without that nothing will work. With levels of trust you can provide openess so all our applications have open APIs which can be used by anyone wishing to create a mashup, hack, tool, whatever. I a lot of places things are locked down.